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The Hofstede Model in Context

Classifying Cultures: Conceptual Dimensions

In an article first published in 1952, U.S. anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn argued that there should be universal categories of culture:

In principle ... there is a generalized framework that underlies the more apparent and striking facts of cultural relativity. All cultures constitute so many somewhat distinct answers to essentially the same questions posed by human biology and by the generalities of the human situation. ... Every society's patterns for living must provide approved and sanctioned ways for dealing with such universal circumstances as the existence of two sexes; the helplessness of infants; the need for satisfaction of the elementary biological requirements such as food, warmth, and sex; the presence of individuals of different ages and of differing physical and other capacities. 

Many authors in the second half of the twentieth century have speculated about the nature of the basic problems of societies that would present distinct dimensions of culture. The most common dimension used for ordering societies is their degree of economic evolution or modernity. A one-dimensional ordering of societies from traditional to modern fitted well with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century belief in progress. Economic evolution is bound to be reflected in people's collective mental programming, but there is no reason why economic and technological evolution should suppress other cultural variety. There exist dimensions of culture unrelated to economic evolution. 

U.S. anthropologist Edward T. Hall divided cultures according to their ways of communicating, into high-context (much of the information is implicit) and low-context cultures (nearly everything is explicit). In practice this distinction overlaps largely with the traditional versus modern distinction.

U.S. sociologists Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils suggested that all human action is determined by five pattern variables, choices between pairs of alternatives: 

  1. Affectivity (need gratification) versus affective neutrality (restraint of impulses); 
  2. Self-orientation versus collectivity-orientation; 
  3. Universalism (applying general standards) versus particularism (taking particular relationships into account); 
  4. Ascription (judging others by who they are) versus achievement (judging them by what they do);
  5. Specificity (limiting relations to others to specific spheres) versus diffuseness (no prior limitations to nature of relations). 

Parsons and Shils claimed that these choices are present at the individual (personality) level, at the social system (group or organization) level, and at the cultural (normative) level. They did not take into account that different variables could operate at different aggregation levels. 

U.S. anthropologists Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck ran a field study in five geographically close, small communities in the Southwestern United States: Mormons, Spanish Americans, Texans, Navaho Indians, and Zuni Indians. They distinguished these communities on the following value orientations: 

  1. An evaluation of human nature (evil - mixed - good); 
  2. The relationship of man to the surrounding natural environment (subjugation - harmony - mastery);
  3. The orientation in time (toward past - present - future);
  4. The orientation toward activity (being - being in becoming - doing); and 
  5. Relationships among people (linearity, i.e., hierarchically ordered positions – collaterality, i.e., group relationships – individualism). 

Others have extrapolated Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck's classification to all kind of social comparisons, without concern for their geographic limitations without considering the effect of levels of aggregation, and without empirical support.

British anthropologist Mary Douglas proposed a two-dimensional ordering of ways of looking at the world: 

  1. 'Group' or inclusion - the claim of groups over members, and 
  2. 'Grid' or classification - the degree to which interaction is subject to rules. 

Douglas saw these categories as relating to a wide variety of beliefs and social actions: Views of nature, traveling, spatial arrangements, gardening, cookery, medicine, the meaning of time, age, history, sickness, and justice. She seemed to imply that these dimensions are applicable to any level of aggregation. 

The one- or more-dimensional classifications above represent subjective reflective attempts to order a complex reality. Each of them is strongly colored by the subjective choices of its author(s). They show some overlap, but their lack of clarity about and mixing of levels of analysis (individual-group-culture) are severe methodological weaknesses. 

These weaknesses were avoided in an extensive review article by U.S. sociologist Alex Inkeles and psychologist Daniel Levinson. The authors limited themselves to culture at the level of nations, and they summarized all available sociological and anthropological studies dealing with what was then called national character, which they interpreted as a kind of modal (most common) personality type in a national society. What I have labelled dimensions they called standard analytic issues. From their survey of the literature Inkeles and Levinson distilled three standard analytic issues that met these criteria: 

  1. Relation to authority; 
  2. Conception of self, including the individual's concepts of masculinity and femininity; 
  3. Primary dilemmas or conflicts, and ways of dealing with them, including the control of aggression and the expression versus inhibition of affect. 

As will be shown below, Inkeles and Levinson's standard analytic issues were empirically supported in a study by this author more than 20 years later.